Soon enough we sail towards the familiar, motoric minor-toned triads, curiously reminiscent of Philip Glass but actually Old Europe: Schubert, Mahler, Berg. Schnittke’s String Trio is a memory work, a 1985 commission designed to commemorate the centenary of Berg’s birth, where memories hallucinate and it transpires that the familiar and unfamiliar are interchangeable. Schnittke’s triads contrive a coming together, a universal point of reference until, thinking back, you realise all those whispered, broken chorales that preceded it were extracted from the melodic inclines of ‘Happy birthday to you’. That any group could play this music better than the Montreal-based Quatuor Molinari is inconceivable. They take a line, have an angle. ‘Happy birthday to you’ is no wry skit, no postmodern prank. Schnittke squeezes all the kindly associations away. Haunted by its own distorted presence, a faded glory caricature, it’s a bitter pill refused any artificial sweetener by Quatuor Molinari. Their perspective is stark and unnerving. Mozartian minuet figurations emerge not as comfort listening but, like all Schnittke’s markers, are in freefall disintegration.

Their performance of Schnittke’s Piano Quintet, with Canadian pianist Louise Bessette, highlights another asset, the scarred, scorched-earth temperament of their base sonic palette. Misrepresenting this piece, composed in memory of Schnittke’s mother, as a Viennese waltz dances by, as whimsy or resolved closure is too easy. Quatuor Molinari’s performance is cooled by death. Notes ache. Tonal cadences are disorientated. The quartet take Schnittke at his word and never has his Piano Quintet felt like such the masterwork. His briefer Piano Quartet (1988), assembled around fragments of Mahler, establishes the mood music and puts these other works in their aesthetic and cultural context.